Notes on Notes

Here are a few random items on notes and note taking that are worth checking out:

Michael Hyatt has an short but excellent article on his method for taking notes on Working Smart called Recovering The Lost Art of Note Taking. There are some excellent ideas here.

There is a great post on 43 Folders praising the power of Post Its™ and some ideas about how to use them. If further interested, read this article from Rake Magazine about their long and fabled history.

Looking for a good Mac tool to drop little text snippets from almost any application for pasting and or saving? Look no further than Sidenote. It takes the form of a little drawer that hides on the side of your screen and hides away when not needed. It will even capture images and rich text.

The Tao of Tiger

OK, I must admit, when I first installed Mac OS 10.4 Tiger and used it for the first couple of days I was fairly underwhelmed. Sure, some of the new features were cool and all but some of the most touted ones simply left me wanting more. The new Mail application for instance, why can’t I change the background color for the new mailbox “drawer” and why can’t I choose which side it lives on? Why do I have to press a button to bring my Dashboard widgets to the front. Why can’t they live permanently on my desktop like Konfabulator widgets do? I mean, if you are going to “borrow” elements of a great idea, why not “borrow” the useful ones.

Thing is, most of the cool features are little tweaks done here and there. The annotation feature in Preview for instance. Yet another step towards never using the painfully slow Adobe Reader ever again. That makes double for the inline PDF viewing now added to Safari.

You want more? Well Apple has posted a nice page detailing more than 200 new features in Tiger. Read this if you install Tiger and wonder what you got for your hard earned cash.